Wednesday Writs: Compost, Human and Otherwise Edition
Photo by The Sierra Club
WW1: California has passed a law requiring certain businesses who laid employees off due to covid to recall them to work. The law covers hospitality and
airport service workers, among others, and applies to workers with six months on the job.
WW2: Speaking of recalls in California, Governor Gavin Newsom is facing one after 12% of the electorate- over 2 million people- signed a petition in favor of a recall election.
WW3: Speaking of beleaguered politicians, disgraced former New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s law license has been suspended for one year. He has agreed to undergo mental health treatment and submit to the supervision of the state bar’s lawyer assistance program.
WW4: If you’re allergic to sesame, good news: the YS is becoming a little safer for you as part of the FASTER ACT, sesame has been added to the list of major allergens which must be listed on packaging warning labels, like peanuts and dairy. The FASTER ACT, or Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education & Research Act, was just signed by President Biden, and requires compliance by January 2023.
WW5: Meanwhile in Colorado, it is about to be legal to turn your earthly remains into compost.
Ww6: Botham Jean’s killer, Amber Guyger, is trying to overturn her conviction.
Guyger’s lawyer, Michael Mowla, argued that evidence presented at trial did not support a murder charge because she mistakenly believed she was in her apartment when she fatally shot Botham Jean in his apartment, one floor above hers, on Sept. 6, 2018. Guyger had just finished her shift and was still in uniform when she shot and killed Jean, who had been eating ice cream on his couch when she arrived.
Guyger is seeking a conviction on a lesser charge called criminally negligent homicide and a shorter prison sentence. Jurors who found her guilty of murder in 2019 also sentenced her to 10 years in prison. The maximum allotted prison time for criminally negligent homicide is two years.
Lawyers for Guyger and the prosecution made their arguments at the Fifth Circuit, who could opt to reduce Guyger’s conviction to the lesser charge.
WW7: Brittany Spears has been under conservatorship for years, and her fans have speculated that she’s being treated unfairly- see the “Free Brittany” movement. Now, Spears will speak in court on her own behalf.
WW8: A high school girl who didn’t make the varsity cheerleading squad and let loose with a swear- filled rant on SnapChat, and lost her spot on the JV squad, too. SCOTUS will decide whether her punishment for words she spoke — outside of school hours and off school grounds— amounts to a First Amendment violation.
WW9: Sneak peak of something I’m working on: Eight members of the same family, found executed in four homes. The only survivors were the babies. Speculation ranged from drug cartels to cock fighting ring involvement. The truth was much more horrifyingly mundane.
What exactly happens to a law that’s ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? I checked a few examples of federal laws that were struck down by the Supreme Court, and all of them were still in the US Code. Does this mean that after the composition of the Court changes, the executive branch can try to enforce the law again in hopes of a different ruling? I realize that stare decisis makes a different ruling unlikely, but is this, in principle, still a legal thing to do?Report
I can’t sleep for other federal agencies’, but our lawyer’s interpretation is that SCOTUS decisions are binding until Congress changes the law. That rarely happens.Report
Many states leave laws that federal courts have ruled unconstitutional, or that have been overruled by federal statutes, on the books for exactly that reason. When I was working for my state’s legislature and having to spend time reading the annotated state statutes, I was surprised by how many times I found sections with a note that said, “This paragraph is not currently enforceable because of <particular federal statute or court decision>.”Report
Not surprising.Report
I talked about this briefly in last week’s Writs, actually: https://ordinary-times.com/2021/04/21/wednesday-writs-frothingham-v-mellon-karens/.
“Justice Sutherland went on to write that it was not the Court’s place, per se, to declare a statute enacted by Congress unconstitutional. Rather, it could do so only when a litigant could show a particularized injury, at which point the Court could only enjoin the acts of federal officials to prevent the carrying out of the statute at issue in Frothingham v. Mellon.”
So basically it is a court order enjoining the government’s employees from carrying out the actions that would effectuate a statue the court deems unconstitutional. But it stays on the books unless and until congress does something about it.Report
Thanks, Em (and others)!
The reason I was curious about this is that, as one does on the Internet from time to time, I came across the claim that John Marshall just made judicial review up out of whole cloth. I’ve thought about this before and decided that it follows pretty trivially from “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution.” After all, ruling a law unconstitutional is just ruling against the government in all its attempts to enforce the law and also warning them not to try again because the result will be the same.
I’ve always found this just a bit unsatisfying, though, because I was under the impression that when the Supreme Court ruled a law unconstitutional, it was actually taken off the books. The ability to permanently repeal a law doesn’t clearly follow from the powers reserved to the Judiciary in the Constitution. But since judicial review doesn’t actually entail repealing a law, it all makes sense, and the legitimacy of judicial review follows trivially from the Article III.Report
WW2: Under the provisions of a bill approved earlier this year, every registered voter in California will receive a ballot by mail for the recall election. Speculation on whether this will hurt or help Newsom goes both ways. (Side note: last November, when California mailed a ballot to every registered voter, turnout jumped dramatically.)Report
As you would expect it to, since mailing every voter a ballot makes voting easy and convenient. Hence why Republicans dislike it so much.Report
Most Republicans. In 2019, Utah adopted full vote by mail. Montana has had a permanent mail-ballot list for a long time, with ~75% of voters using it. Arizona’s permanent list includes more than 80% of their voters. While bills to greatly restrict the use have been introduced in AZ this year, Republican leadership has kept them bottled up in committee.Report
WW4: link is to the Schneiderman story.
Anyway, if I keel over in Oklahoma (from sesame allergy or other), please drag my mortal remains into Colorado; I have a horror of both embalment and cremation so being able to be composted seems more ideal. (There was a company that wanted to put in a ‘natural burials” place near here but of course people rejected it)Report
Thank you – link fixed!
Also, I share your sentiments re: my ultimate disposal.Report
Freeze dried and planted under a tree sapling!Report
Yes, I’m hoping to avoid both as well; out here in crunchy country a number of our older folks have passed and their burials have been simple pine (or walnut) boxes in a 6ft hole on their own property. Looking into it a bit, I was surprised burying human remains isn’t the big deal people make it out to be… given enough space, distance from wells and such (100 ft). To be sure, doesn’t work in big cities and/or suburbs… but a lot of country folk are just buried 6’ft under on a bit of a rise… as I hope to be. Almost every property out here has the family plot that most folks benignly neglect (assuming it isn’t their family) which is not to say actively remove/destroy, but just sort of keep it respectfully cordoned off, if a bit overgrown. During Lent and other seasons for remembering the dead, we walk down the road to the next-door property where just such a family plot exists.
The no embalming is trickier… you have to be buried within 24 hrs of death (not sure exactly how this works vis-a-vis cold-storage/morgues)… but the main point is that absent plans/preparation it seemed the harder path to navigate… but not impossible.Report
I’m planning to donate any usable organs to anyone who needs them and then go the cremation route . . . unless composting becomes a thing. I had considered burial at sea – it fits with my professional bent after all – but its also not easy to accomplish unless you are spreading someone’s ashes.Report
My mother, who died in Florida, wanted to be cremated and wanted her ashes buried at her parents’ grave near Cooperstown, New York. We finally managed to coordinate our schedules and complied with her wishes. One of my brothers arranged a lunch at the Otesaga, Cooperstown’s leading resort. As something of a joker, he told the staff it was the Cremation Table.
My niece was then working for a coffee company and had brought several plastic tubes of a new blend for us to try. As the lunch broke up, someone left a tube behind. The stricken waitress ran after us with the tube whimpering: “You left your mother.”
We quickly eased her concerns. But I still have my tube.Report
Washington state approved human composting in 2019. The first opened last December, with more on the way, and they accept bodies shipped in from out of state. https://www.columbian.com/news/2021/jan/24/recompose-the-first-human-composting-funeral-home-in-the-u-s-is-now-open-for-business/Report
WW6: How silly. They’re not going to reverse the conviction on an evidentiary issue that was contested at trial. One wonders whether the lawyer just wanted a fat fee or the defendant simply refuse to listen when the lawyer said that there was no chance of a reversal on that ground.Report
WW5: Oooh, this is good. I was considering donating my body to a body farm (I believe there is one in Arizona and one in Tennessee), but this is much closer to home.Report
I really really want more info on WW9! I spent almost a minute looking for a link before reading comprehension kicked in.Report
What is the point of human composting? There doesn’t seem to be any real shortage of biomass to compost, such that the occasional human body is going to contribute significantly. Is it just a sentimental thing, like if you want grandma in tree form?Report
Basically it’s an ecological thing. Embalming and burying is both land use intensive and puts a really toxic corpse into the ground. Cremation is considerably more eco friendly but it’s energy and carbon intensive which, in our AGW days, isn’t considered particularly ecologically conscious.
Composting is not energy or emission intensive, uses no significant chemicals and the end result biomass ranges from either ecologically harmless to mildly ecologically helpful and uses no land at all for storage.
It’s a bit pricey but, in theory, with economies of scale, automation and skill development if they scale it up it could extremely rapidly become highly affordable.
It’s a touch woo woo for me, I’d prefer cremation personally, but I can see why a person who’s highly eco-conscious would prefer it.Report
the distaste for cremation with me, I get that it’s totally an emotional response. I lost a loved one to the after-effects of a fire, and so I admit I have a horror of the idea.
even though I’d be dead. I realize it’s illogical. But I’ve thought on occasion if I were fixin’ to die, and I knew it, I’d try to crawl out to a really remote natural area and just lie down and hope I wasn’t found.
Embalming, it’s all the chemicals and the concrete and everything, it seems very wasteful. I have no children, people will forget I existed three months after I’m gone, I don’t need some monument to me sticking out of the ground somewhere.Report
I totally sympathize, I have a distaste for the idea of moldering in the ground and the idea of composting is similarly distasteful to me whereas I feel like cremation is very a very crisp and efficient method. My Grandmother was cremated, also, and I know that influenced me too.
The reality is that all burial methods are based on emotion and feeling, otherwise we’d just chuck our dead out back and let the birds have at em (sky burial).Report
“What is the point of human composting?”
It’s entirely symbolic.
Doesn’t mean it’s valueless, but it does mean that the value is more about feelings than it is about anything else.Report